America’s failed Machiavelli
Professor Edward Luttwak is a strategist and historian known for his works on grand strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations. A former chief of staff of the US Air Force describes him as "a hell of a lot smarter than Clausewitz."
November 4, 1975 may have been my birthday, but it was also a Tuesday; hence I went to my day job as consultant to the Immediate Office of the Secretary of Defense James Rodney Schlesinger, a three-room enclave in the Pentagon’s outermost E-ring. Absorbed in my own thoughts, I did not notice that anything was wrong until I heard someone consoling Schlesinger’s secretary and confidante. Schlesinger, it turned out, had been dismissed by President Ford; Donald Rumsfeld was in.
A newcomer to the US, I had been hired off the streets by Francis J. West, Schlesinger’s Special Assistant, a young Marine combat veteran who had already published a celebrated book about the Vietnam War. Schlesinger liked to collect brains (one, Andrew Marshall, served as Director of Net Assessment for 42 years, retiring at age 94), but with me he was habitually quarrelsome, in part over his obsession with Jews — he was a convert to Lutheranism of all things.
When Donald Rumsfeld arrived, his very elegant suits cut a sharp contrast to Schlesinger’s tweedy birdwatcher clothes . Unlike his predecessor, he had no intellectual credentials at all but he was certainly a political prodigy; he had won a seat in Congress when he was 30, became a White House Cabinet-level counsellor for Nixon at 37, and then Ambassador to Nato before he was recalled to serve as Chief of Staff for President Ford in 1974.
